Jennie About to Be (21 page)

She took the gown downstairs and washed it in rainwater in a kitchen basin, scrubbing as best she could where it needed extra attention. Then she took it out and spread it on the drying green. The sun wasn't up yet, but the sky showed a fragile blue at the zenith. Even the knowledge that Fergus was in the stables with the horses and Nigel was asleep in the house couldn't take away the illusion that she was alone in the world, except for the birds who piercingly proclaimed their territorial integrity. She felt a regard for them as equals.

Mrs. MacIver had left a banked coal fire in one of the stoves, and Jennie expertly revived it; she'd learned from Mary Ann at home. The porridge was ready, after slowly cooking on the back of the stove all night. The eggs and rashers were in the pantry. She set the table with the delft and went up to wake Nigel and dress. She had included her big holland apron in that private carpetbag, and she wore it over her dress while she served breakfast.

“If we're ever reduced to living in a cottage without even one servant,” she told him, “I'd do very well, you see. We could even keep a cow; I can milk; at least I've had a go at it, and the cow didn't seem to mind.”

He gave her a slap on the bottom and pulled her into his lap. “And I can't do this with the maids, no matter how bewitching they are.”

Archie and Christabel called for them in a shining midnight blue barouche, with ornate gilt G's painted on the side panels. The horses were Bruce and Wallace, and Iain Innes was on the box. His hat was as glossy as his bots; his breeches looked new; his coat matched the barouche. The whole turnout was undeniably smart, and Iain was as stolid amidst the elegance as any London coachman. She spoke to him by name, and he touched a finger to his hatbrim and seemed to look through her.

Christabel wore buff crepe trimmed with apricot velvet, a feathered hat with a scarf of veiling floating from it, and carried a parasol. Jennie, in her dress and pelerine of willow-green cambric, felt dressed like a schoolgirl, and the little white straw hat trimmed with lilies of the valley completed the illusion.

“Ah, Jeannie!” Archie fairly leaped from the barouche to hand her in. “What a flower you are this morning!”

“Thank you,” she said demurely. She smiled at Christabel. It was going to be a long ride, a long service, a probably uncomfortable pew, a long drive back again, and a long dinner at Linnmore House while the day blazed mockingly outside those sealed windows. She'd be a fool if she didn't reward herself for all the suffering by getting Archie alone.

“Will there be a Gaelic service?” she asked.

“Ours will be in English,” said Christabel. “It is the law now because so many people speak it. There's one for the Gaels, following.”

“Not too well attended these days, Macleod tells me,” Archie said. “I don't like it. If they start losing their respect for the Sabbath, God knows where they'll end up.”

“Then if He knows, why should you worry?” Jennie asked. Archie haw-hawed and slapped his thigh.

Christabel was not amused. “A loss of respect for the clergy leads to anarchy.”

“Anarchy sounds so violent,” said Jennie, “and the people I've met so far seem far from violent.” Nigel signaled her with a warning wink.

“Macleod will have to make some pastoral visits,” he said lazily, “and round up his flock. Crack the whip. Threaten them with hellfire; they always used to be desperately afraid of that, as I remember.”

Archie was pinching his lower lip and pulling at it. “It's not the same anymore. In the old days—well, only last summer—you'd see them on the roads on the way to the kirk. Never missed. In the winter it took a blizzard to keep them home. From all over the estate they'd come. They'd have to start at daybreak, some of them.” He looked mournful. “I can't understand a bit of it. ”

“It's Grant!” snapped Christabel. “He undermined our authority in his sly way, and now we have Alick Gilchrist telling them the ministers are hand in glove with the landlords.”

There was a silence. Archie cleared his throat, and Christabel fussed with a fold of her skirt.

“That's a handsome crop of oats,” Nigel said.

“Aye, it is!” Archie agreed too vehemently for the subject.

A wagon waited in the road by the dwelling at the home farm, and the family and servants were getting themselves settled. Christabel nodded remotely; Archie and Nigel lifted their hats. Jennie sang out, “Good morning!”

A little while later Bruce and Wallace caught up with the wagon from the other farm; there were more greetings, and some candid stares as the farm people tried to get a good look at the Captain and his wife. Jennie gave them one of her best smiles.

“Oh, what a lovely baby!” she exclaimed of a large infant who looked like Henry the Eighth without a beard.

Archie at once leaned forward with a great grinful of teeth and said, “Aye, that's a very lovely baby!” Then he settled back and nodded at Jennie.

Looking overheated, his wife said in a thick, half-suffocated voice, “We don't as a rule call out from the carriage, especially to the servants. ”

“Och, what's the harm?” asked Archie, sounding very Highland.

It was while they were driving over the stone bridge above the deep ravine, where the air should have been fragrant with verdant new life, that they began to smell the smoke.

It hung heavy and rank, it made Jennie's nostrils prickle, and it stung her eyes. A thin haze soiled air that should have been crystalline, and the queer thing was that no one remarked on it. Christobel was holding a scented handkerchief to her nose, and her eyes were watery, but her face was empty. The men sitting opposite them ran out of conversation about the farms, the fishing, and the deer stalking. Archie played compulsively with the seals on his watch chain, while Nigel sat motionless, looking out as if he'd never before seen the country they were passing through and couldn't take his eyes off it.

The carriage rounded a curve of the sheltering hills, and she heard the church bell; at the same time she saw the dirty brown pall of smoke lying off to the northeast beyond a border of forest and low hills.

“Look at that!” she cried out. “There must be a terrible fire somewhere!”

Iain Innes turned his head at her outcry and looked back at her. “There was that, Mistress. A terrible burning and a sinful one.”

Christabel took a sharp, quick breath, but before she could speak to him, he'd turned back, and it was as if he had never moved at all. “
Archie!
” Christabel said. “Did you hear that insolence?”

“What was that, my dearie? No. My mind was wandering.” It was a poor lie. Jennie had sensed, if not seen, his flinching movement when Iain spoke, as if a thorn had suddenly pierced his hand. Nigel was fingering his cravat.

“They start easily,” he said. “Someone knooks over a candle and—” He lifted his hands. “Or an enemy fires the thatch. Pehaps that was what Iain meant by ‘sinful.' Let's hope that no one died in it.” He sat forward and patted Jennie's knee.

The village stank with smoke, and the people who stood outside the front door of the church were either obviously disturbed by it or obviously trying to ignore it. As the smoke moved past the sun, the yews became black and funereal.

Iain drove the barouche away. Archie spoke loudly and toothily, neighed, shook hands, clapped shoulders; Christabel dispensed pinched nods and small, tight smiles. Nigel was handsomely at ease, bowing with the negligent grace that Royalty never seemed to achieve. There wasn't time to introduce Jennie to his old acquaintances because they went directly into the church to a pew under the pulpit, and the service began at once.

The minister was the white-haired man who'd taken his hat off to the chaise in the rain a week ago. His features were heavy, and his bad color wasn't improved by the black gown and the white Geneva bands. His mouth turned relentlessly down at the corners, and his eyes were either weirdly enlarged behind thick spectacles or disappearing completely when the lenses caught and reflected light.

Jennie expected that he would speak of the fire, certainly in his prayer and possibly in his sermon. He did neither. He prayed with tremendous eloquence for the blind to see the Light and the deaf to hear the Word, and after the first ten minutes Jennie stopped listening. Was he approachable about her school? Did he even care about the poor? Not enough to go near them apparently. But perhaps he was a sick man; did Presbyterian ministers have curates? They should have.

Dr. McIeod prayed for victory over the French and asked for holy leadership for the gallant generals. No mention of the gallant troopers and foot soldiers. She waited for a word about the young men from Linnmore. It didn't come.

The stench of the smoke seeped into the church. Throats were cleared, and noses discreetly blown. Dr. Macleod coughed and drank water, but he didn't mention the fire. Still, even if no one had died, surely there were people homeless; wouldn't it be as proper to pray for them as for the gallant generals? . . . Ask
this
man about her school?
Hah
! Jennie thought scornfully, and was homesick for dear William.

The sermon was concerned with one of the minor prophets, Habakkuk. Dr. Macleod had given Habakkuk a good deal of time and attention. One advantage of being pregnant, she thought hopefully, was that she could feel especially delicate on Sundays and unable to make the long drive here and back. Keeping her eyes uplifted and fixed on the black and white figure in the pulpit, she felt herself swooping toward sleep in giddy spirals.

Archie coughed resoundingly, and she jumped. Christabel's mortified annoyance was as palpable as the reek. Nigel's arm pressed hard against Jennie's, and they exchanged little grins with the pleased guilt of school-children communicating under the master's nose.

Archie's cough set off a fusillade through the congregation, and Dr. Macleod raised his voice over it. Habakkuk conquered. She had never been so tired of a name in her life. She wondered how many of the congregation were actually entranced by Habakkuk and how many had learned to gaze glassily at the minister while their minds departed to other places. She was sure that Nigel, as relaxed as a well-fed lion on his native turf, hadn't heard a word after the opening sentence.

Finally the service was over, the benediction pronounced, and they could go out, not into the sweetness of May but to the stinging haze. Nigel introduced Jennie and the minister in the doorway. Dr. Macleod's out-of-the-pulpit voice was moderated to an agreeable pitch, and grave courtliness softened his massive features. His eyes did not look so strange, an odd but pleasant greenish hazel.

“I hope you will be very happy here at Linnmore,” he said. “It is a beautiful part of the Highlands.”

“I've loved it from the start,” she said. “But I don't intend simply to exist here. I'd like to start a—”

“Jennie,”
Nigel said, “did you know there are some remarkable Pictish stones in the churchyard? The carving's quite fantastic, wouldn't you say so, sir?”

“Nigel, my boy!” Archie called from out on the walk. “Here's an old friend of yours!”

“Perhaps Dr. Macleod will show me the Pictish stones and explain them to me,” Jennie said demurely.

“I shall be happy to, Mrs. Gilchrist.” They walked away from Nigel, down the shallow steps and around the corner into the churchyard. At one side a family group all in black were visiting a recent grave; the women wept silently. The yews and some tall old stones fenced off the decorous sociability in front of the church and muted the sounds of carriages coming up. She followed the tall robed figure across grass where violets and wild strawberry blossoms grew.

He showed her the intricately chiseled Pictish stones and told her a little about their origin. “I have so much to learn about my new country,” she said humbly. “But I have something to give too. Dr. Macleod, I want to start a school for the children in the moorland cottages. It seems very wrong for them to be allowed to grow up illiterate.”

It was abrupt, but she didn't know how long she'd have before she was caught; she'd always been sorry for the fox, and now she felt like one. He listened to her with his arms up the sleeves of his robe as if he were cold. His eyes swam vaguely behind his spectacles, his mouth was turned down at the corners again. What was he like when he was young? she wondered. Did he ever laugh and sing and dance?

“My father told me,” she said, “that the Presbyterians respect education almost as much as they do God.”

It was brazen, but it worked. He shook his head as if a stinging fly were goading him. “But surely you—” He stopped.

“Yes?” she prompted him. “Did you mean that surely I've discussed it with my brother-in-law? I plan to do that today, but I've been waiting until I could mention a little help from the manse.” She smiled at him. “What possible objection could he have to my teaching the children for a few hours each day?”

“There should be none. But I had thought—I'd supposed—” He broke off, shaking his head again. Perhaps she'd been right about his health, and he was exhausted from the service, even light-headed.

“It takes time to start a school,” she said, “especially when the childen speak very little English, or none. I need simple Gaelic texts, if there are such things. I thought you'd know, Dr. Macleod. Once they learn to read their own language, we can begin English.”

He still didn't speak but seemed lost in a study of her. She said kindly, “Perhaps you will think about it when you are rested?”

Nigel appeared around the yews, his hat under his arm and his bare head almost silver against their darkness.

“Mrs. Gilchrist, I will do anything within my power to help you,” the minister said suddenly. “I shall compose the texts myself, and make lists of words with their phonetic pronunciation to help you learn the language.”